Shroud of the Avatar Video
Transcript #1

Shroud of
the Avatar Ustream
transcript 2013-03-08
(38:05)

Richard
Garriot: RG

Chris
Spears: CS

If it
doesn't DIRECTLY involve
the game (anecdotes and
flashbacks of old
times) I will simply
paraphrase.

RG: Talking
about original game on
teletype...1500 lines of
code...DnD#1....First ever
fantasy role playing game
written on a
computer...instructions,
character class, weapons,
armour...etc...claims
mantle
of first fantasy based
role playing game on
computer...etc...

RG: Wrote
Akalabeth on the Apple II,
first time to see
graphics, mother
helped with art and father
helped with mathematics of
corridors...First ever 3d
graphics in any fantasy
role playing game...summer
job @ computer land
store...published
Akalabeth...invested $200
in ziploc bags and xerox
sheets...sold 12...Still
have the disks and manuals
for all unsold Akalabeth
games...game pirated in
California...company
contacted me to sell the
game for
$35...got $5 per
game...$150,000

RG: Started
making a new game called
Ultimatum...needed a new
name...Ultima...sold for
$40, sold 50,000
copies...one of the first
ever game
developers...creating
virtual world...wanted
games sold in a box, not a
plastic
bag...wanted crazy swag
like cloth maps...most
publishers said forget it,
Sierra agreed...started
Origin with
brother...published Ultima
3...started work
on Ultima 4, wanted it to
be different, no more
min/max'ing, introduced
consequences of cheating,
best seller...Ultima 5 had
better storytelling,
Ultima 6 got better,
Ultima 7 went to a new
level of depth in world
interactivity...

RG: Began
using the term Avatar,
based on the idea of your
projection of
you in the world, not
role-playing a "hero," you
are you...bad deeds
affect your
karma…researching virtues
led me to hindu texts that
describe
avatar…physical diety on
earth, or of a
thought/ideal…your avatar
being
projected in new world…you
want to be the best avatar
that embodies the virtues
of the game…tried to
trademark “avatar”
couldn’t happen…

RG: Ultima
online discussion…pretty
good game…Akalabeth flash
back, found
old notebook, all puzzle
based…six sided
star…insert gems into
star…good things,
bad things happen based on
puzzle…attempts at puzzles
and diverse interactions
are attempted in
everything I do…back to
ultima online…always
trying to make
multiplayer games…dial up
AOL, 1 to 10,000 players
for text or graphic MUD…UO
was an early idea, party
of npcs always
interesting…advent of
internet led to
UO, EA meetings to lobby
to make UO…wouldn’t take
no for an answer. Please
let
us go over budget on U9 in
order to prototype UO,
bastard step child
project…took
bottom of the barrel
employees that put
together $250,000
prototype UO, beta
tested game for $5. EA
projections of lifetime
units to be sold were
30,000
units…In 1 week, 50,000
people signed up…EA didn’t
want to admit it was a
great
idea…tons of new
employees, budget went
up…etc…fastest selling
EA/Origin game
at the time…some great
things in UO, some
terrible things…

RG: Aspect
of multiplayer…Pking…UO
remains most open pk
experience, newbies
were being slaughtered,
worked against success of
the community…we have to
get PKing
right in a new game…after
we launched U9 and UO,
that was the end of EA
wanting
us to develop games…wing
commander online proposed
and shot down by EA…Shit
hit
the fan, company blew
up…15 years have
passed…Ultima fell into
disarray.

RG: We have
to go back and raise the
mantle to the newest
generation of
gamers…most role playing
games recently have been
chasing the EQ model, not
the
Ultima model…too much
min/max’ing…we want to
bring back the golden age,
story
driven, largely solo
player experience that
tries to bring that
success to
multiplayer environment
that is ABSOLUTELY NOT an
MMO, a world that grows
and
changes with the
interaction of other
players. To be played with
friends and
strangers when desired,
let’s start answering
questions…

What have
we been meaning or
describing as “solo
player” and
“multiplayer” and
“online” and offline”?

RG: Let me
do my best to try to
clarify what we mean by
that, first of all
this game is first and
foremost a PC game, a pc
downloadable, executable
game. We
are making it so that it
will be available to
download on our site or
others.
The game is a story driven
game and the game we
currently believe you’ll
be
able to play completely
offline, meaning you never
have to connect to the
internet;
you won’t be forced to
connect to the internet.
Now that’s our intention,
we’ll
see how big it gets and
see if we actually need
some server contact
periodically just for
patches and other things
that require you to
connect. The
intention is that it
really feels like
something that is
completely solo player
and me as a player, I do a
lot of playing offline
just for practice and I’m
often away from a
connection, I’m very
personally motivated to
make sure that this
remains true.

But in
addition to it being a
story driven game for you
to proceed through,
while you are online the
game will automatically
not only patch itself but
the
world is also persistent
and can be impacted by
other players. What
I mean by
that is if you go into
cities and towns, and you
can see this in the videos
online, the cities and towns
have a core infrastructure
that we’ve created that
make sure that if you’re
playing solo you can go
there to buy and sell
things,
the basic shops that are
required to proceed, but in
those cities and towns
there are plenty of empty
lots where you can buy and
build a home or business
and so as long as you’re
online it will constantly
update. For example, if
you’ve
built a great blacksmith
shop in the center of town,
every player going in and
out of that town will walk
by your blacksmith shop,
talk to your vendor, and
buy or sell the things that
you have made and therefore
we believe it will
spread your good name and
bring economic value to you,
the blacksmith who built
that shop.

Additionally,
and by the way in those
towns, unlike in UO where
we had open
housing where you could
literally just go out into
the forest and plop down a
house, in SotA we have a
dual scale map, so there’s
outdoor travel mode like
in
earlier Ultima and then
you zoom in when you enter
a town or an encounter at
a
point of interest into a 3rd
person over the shoulder
view and it is
in that view area when in
towns and villages that
you can build a shop or
house. That means by
definition there are only
a limited amount of places
to
build a house, that
doesn’t mean that any of
you that are for example
from the group The
Syndicate or from any
other meta group that
you
might consider yourself
a part of, it doesn’t
mean that we can’t go
build a
town just for you so we
can have both open
housing or open up new
townships so
to speak, new places to
build. But
because each one of those
only has somewhere
between 12 and 150 houses
in it maximum, it means
that housing is always
going
to be scarce and while we
intend to make sure that
we release them into the
player base at fair price,
just like in UO whatever
town has become the most
popular for people coming
in and out to drop off
equipment or buy new
equipment, that’s where
you’re going to want to
own property if you want
to be
a blacksmith and that’s
why we really think that
the homes or lots to build
on
that are in the major
cities are so much more
valuable than lots in
towns or
villages, frankly even in
villages they’re still
valuable because there
just aren’t
that many.

We don’t
anticipate that everyone
playing the game will have
a house.
Houses are not only a
place to decorate with
your trophies but also a
storage
place where you can take
your booty or equipment
that you’ll take out on
your
next adventure. Our
current plan is that we
will let you sell your
house where it
was originally founded and
take it with you so to
speak and drop it down in
another empty lot in
another town if as the
game progresses you change
your
mind as to what city you
want to live in.

So I’ve gone
from that solo player to
that persistent world that
you can
see the persistent results
of each place, I see some
people asking will you
be able to have a vendor
and I
think it comes by default
if you set up as a
blacksmith for example I
think you
have to have a vendor
because that’s the way the
majority of people will
interact with you as a
blacksmith is through your
vendor because most of you
won’t be able to afford to
be online 24 hours a day.

But let me
get back to how we’ll
include the real time
multiplayer, now if
you think of an MMO, in a
massive multiplayer game,
every person connected to
that shard, and I’ll get
back to how we invented
the word “shard” in a
minute,
but if every player on a
single shard dog piles
into a single place like
Lord
British’s castle, the
MMO’s servers will do as
good a job as it can to
manage
everyone being in the same
place at the same time so
the servers begin to bog
down and even for you who
are in the scene when
1000s of people cram into
the
same scene at the same
time, the render pipeline
on your side of things
begins
to bog down and that
really means you spend a
ton of money and time on
trying
to solve that problem
technically and so it
really represents a
problem that we
don’t think adds much to
gameplay but is very
difficult and very
expensive for
us to overcome and it will
take us not only a lot of
money but a lot of time to
deal with well.

So we think
it’s better, we know it’s
better for us but we also
think it’s
better for players to
instead be chasing being
an MMO, we are not making
an
MMO, what we are making
again is a solo player,
hand crafted story-based
experience
that has this persistent
world and does what we’re
looking for a good term
and
we’re open to suggestions,
a term for something like
ad-hoc multiplayer and
what I mean by that is
that when you are playing
we will look for friends
of
yours in the game, so if
you’ve told us who your
friends are then we’ll
look
for those people, if
you’ve given us access to
your g+ account or your
facebook, or wherever you
might keep a friend’s
list, we’ll pull those
names.
What we’ll do is if any of
your friends are playing
we will do our best to
tell
you what they’re doing,
hey your friend just put
up a blacksmith’s shop go
check it out or if your
friend is in the same
geographic area you’ll
actually
see them, you’ll see them
moving around in the
outdoor map, you’ll see
them
moving around inside that
town and if you see your
friend have an encounter
in
the outdoor map you’ll see
some crossed swords on
that map and you think
that
oh my friend’s in there
having an encounter and
you can just walk over to
those
crossed swords and jump
right in with them. If
they’re visiting a gypsy,
maybe
they’re having their
fortune read or you might
see them attacking a
gypsy, you
might see the gypsies
attacking them, but
whatever’s going on you
can just walk
in behind and see what’s
going on…

I’m seeing a
lot of people asking me: How
do
I feel about UO gamers?
Well of course I love
UO gamers, why you don’t
even
need to ask, of course,
but as I was saying,
*thanks Chris Spears*
Chris has
been the main man to keep
the drum beat going and
bringing all this stuff
up,
he got the stream going
too, the team has done
exceptional work to get
this
ready for bringing it live
to you guys. Did I clarify
the solo player vs.
multiplayer? That seemed
to be the main thing that
seemed to be misunderstood
or at least to be one of
the things that people are
debating online so I hope
that you can spread the
word of what we are really
creating, the way I want
to
describe it again, this is
really a solo player
experience, it is a
story-driven game, that
you will follow the
plotline through. That
being said
there is a persistent
world that changes based
on all the players impact
on the
persistent world and we
are going to bring in at
your choice, players that
you
know so that you can see
them and be told about
them and we’re also
looking at
bringing to you players
that are on a
counter-purpose and I’ll
take this time
to transition into the PvP
question
we were talking about.

We don’t
want to do open PvP like
we did in UO, but we also
don’t want to
do opt-in PvP, like going
to a shard that is a PvP
shard, we don’t have
shards,
we don’t want to do that,
we don’t want to have to
have a flag that you set
or
that if you’re evil you’re
set to PvP. We’re thinking
that we’ll make it
story-based if for example
you get to a point in the
game where you take on a
task that asks of you to
move something like
contraband from one side
of the world
to the other, you’re told
upfront that by the way
since this is contraband
you
will have a price on your
head during that run,
which means you’re open
for PvP
and people who are on that
same path will be told
that there’s a guy running
contraband and that maybe
they should track it down.
That means that you the
runner will go maybe I
shouldn’t take the main
roads because people might
be
waiting there, hunting me,
instead you’ll take the
back roads but that maybe
has you going through
dangerous swamps or deep
forests that will be full
of
other perils and the
hunters will know that you
have to come through a
pinch
point, maybe a valley, so
they’ll camp out and try
to catch the runner there.
In any case this is what
we’re toying with, this
story-driven PvP as
opposed to
open-PvP but we’ll set up
a whole debate on this, on
the SotA website, just
talking about PvP, so that
we don’t upset either camp
of extremes but that we
also make it compelling
enough to be desirable, we
want to make it so even
the
players that normally
wouldn’t be interested are
enticed to try it and that
it
is sufficiently deep and
allows that full looting
that I see some people are
talking about and maybe we
can include full looting
if the people understand
that they are at risk of
this and that the reward
is encouraging enough to
enter into it. We’re
toying with that and we’ll
figure it out together,
we’ll
figure out PvP.

Someone is
asking: Will the game
require a subscription?
The answer is no, our
current intention is that
the
way we’re planning to
launch this is as a
digital download game,
we’ll also
sell a premium,
“collector’s edition” with
all the physical
components but when
you first download it
it’ll be a trial version,
that you can at least get
into
the game and explore the
foundational aspects of
the game for no charge but
as
soon as you want to
explore the skill trees,
you can pick up a sword
and wave a
wand but as soon as you
want to learn fancy sword
moves that would allow you
to
engage in significant
combat, you really have to
buy the game. They’ll be a
normal premium product
price to unlock the main
game. Then we’re currently
planning 5 episodes, the
map you’ve seen is really
the 1st episode
that’s about 10% of the
total world space and on a
yearly schedule we’ll
release large installments
of new content but we’ll
be releasing new content
constantly and a lot of
that new content, new
islands, new towns, will
download
to you ad-hoc while you
play but it could be that
we release big pieces of
content
which we will charge for,
optionally for a fee if
you choose to buy them.
For
example if we don’t launch
with an alchemist, if we
create a skill tree for
alchemists, to buy into
that class or have access
to that tree, there may be
a
price and so what we’re
not going to be doing is
small micro-transactions,
we
are not doing a facebook
game, we are not doing a
“ville” game, we are not
doing a social media game,
we are making a
story-driven,
character-based,
role-playing game
delivered for you on PC.

We’re
developing in the UNITY
engine, and one of the
advantages of UNITY is
that it cross-compiles
really easily. So with the
change of a compilation
variable we can tell it to
develop output for a PC,
Mac or Linux, it’s a
little
bit more than that but
I’ll wave my hand and
it’ll magically appear on
Mac and
Linux. The other thing is
as a gamer, I play at
least half of my games on
tablets
and just because they’re
really convenient for me
to take when I’m on travel
and often those tablets
are offline and also with
UNITY and even more effort
we
could tell it to compile
for a tablet that however
is a considerably bigger
stretch. To run on a
tablet, first it has to
fit on a tablet, in the
memory,
and the graphics engines
are usually not nearly as
powerful, and so we’re not
sure what throttling down
the game into a tablet
would entail, but for me,
as a
player I would love to
play it on a tablet, not
some sister product of the
auction
house or something, I want
to play the full game or
nothing as far as I’m
concerned but for me
personally I’m hoping we
can still shoehorn it in
onto a
tablet but we are 1st
and foremost making a PC
game.

So let’s see
here, let’s keep looking
at questions coming
through the
pipeline here.

*Chris
Spears speaks up*

CS: For the
tablet version, I think
the big thing is we don’t
want to…I
tried to tackle the
questions on my own and
they wanted us to hug
earlier…